


Bearing Gifts

by UrsulaKohl



Category: Lantern Bearers - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Ancient History, Angst, F/M, Marriage Proposal, Premarital Sex, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrsulaKohl/pseuds/UrsulaKohl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Isn't it always so?" Flavia said.  "The men fight, and after the fighting, the women fall to the conquerors."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bearing Gifts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [osprey_archer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/gifts).



**I.**  
  
When she was very small, Flavia played at being Dido, because she'd heard that Dido was a queen.  She was angry when she heard how Dido died, and angrier yet when she learned the queen burned for a man. "I shall never fall in love," she told her tutor.  
  
"The gods set the fire in Dido's heart," said Demetrius, "or so Vergil sang."  
  
"I shall have a bow," Flavia told her nurse, "and roam the forest with my brother, like Diana."  
  
"Oh, will you now, child?" Gwyna asked.  "Will you lay out your fate like a garden?"  
  
Yes, Flavia thought, a wild garden, with fountains.  But the flowers were blooming white on the hillside, and she feared Gwyna would set her to spinning if she lingered, so she did not pursue the argument.  
  
  
 **II.**  
  
The girl was light, and snarling like a cat or a rat.  Wihtgar planned to give her to his sister; they were near in age, it seemed.  Hilde would like to play the lady of her father's hall, with a handmaiden at her side.  When they built a hall.  For now Hilde might do just as well with a wild cat to guard her, in a camp full of men.  His fighting fever was beginning to ebb, and the words tolled in his ears as he tramped down the hill.  A camp full of men.  A camp full of men.  
  
Once they reached the edge of the steading, Wihtgar swung the girl off his back, keeping one hand round her wrist.  She snatched for the knife at his belt, so he grabbed her other wrist. She went still, all at once.  The flames of her father's house leaped behind her, and shadow fell on her face like the smudges on the moon.  She looked ancient.  She could be a moon woman.  
  
"You have a long walk before you," he told her, "and I have a long rowing.  Will you come quietly?"  
  
She spat.  She would not understand him.  
  
"Give me your belt, Ceol," he commanded.  
  
Ceol grumbled that Wihtgar was old enough to snare his own rats; but Wihtgar was his father's son, and old enough to make himself obeyed.  He took Ceol's belt, tied the girl's hands, and started dragging her away from the stinging smoke of her father's hall.

  
  
 **III.**  
  
Flavia came awake with the sun pounding onto her head and fire behind her eyes.  Everything was swaying.  She could hear men's voices, chanting.  They bore down on the ends of their words.  They sounded angry.  
  
Flavia could say four things in Saxon: "Brother", "Sister", "Stand up straight," and "Stop loafing about!"  Aquila said "Stop loafing" was the key.  If you could make your men understand that, you were halfway to being a Roman officer.  
  
Stop loafing, Flavia told herself.  You are a Roman.  She opened her eyes.  She was in the center of a long, narrow boat, with benches before and behind her.  She struggled to her knees, and looked up at a pair of huge men, chanting and rowing.  She tried to say "Brother" in Saxon, but her throat hurt, and it came out a sort of rasp.  She tried again, and then she was shouting it.  " _Brothar_!  _Brothar_ , damn you, where is he?"  
  
He stared at her.  Suddenly he laughed.  " _Brothar_ , ha?  _Brothar_?"  He tipped his head back and howled like a wolf.  He was wearing her brother's belt, the leather one with the eagle buckle.  It just barely went round his waist.  
  
Aquila was dead.  He was dead and eaten by wolves.  She had no name and no family.    
  
Flavia had lost her hairpins somewhere in the long trudge toward the sea; she already looked like a mourner.  She twisted her tied hands round to scratch her face, threw her head back, and keened, calling sometimes on the Lord and sometimes on her father, until her mouth tasted of iron and she could scream no more.

 

  
 **IV.**  
  
Wihtgar had to dump marsh water over the girl's head when they landed, to stop her wailing.  It was an odd sort of battle fever, he thought, that led him to take a screaming child with a dagger, and not a wineskin or a brooch.    
  
Then he went to wipe the blood from her cheeks, and learned something quite simple: the girl was not Hilde's age, after all.  Hilde was tall and strong and glossy-haired, as befit the daughter of a man with many cows.  This girl was small and sharp, and hissing like a snake, with her hair wetted close to her head.  But she had breasts to feed a child with, clearly.  And a woman's grief.  
  
He had no other gift for his sister; and he knew now, he thought, why Ceol had been laughing.  He would have to make the best of it.  He explained himself carefully and slowly, though without any hope of translation, as he would to his wisest hound: "I shall braid your hair now and make you presentable, and give you to my sister, for women I think should not be alone.   But you are of my house, and I am Wihtgar son of Wiermund of the White Horse, and you may call on me if you need me."  
  
Her gaze caught in the distance, on the shore of the Romans' Island, and then on his face.  " _Swestar_?" she asked.  
  
"Yes, I am Wihtgar son of Wiermund, and my sister is Wulfhild."  
  
That was not the answer to her question, if she understood him at all.  Her gaze was back on the far shore.  But she stood quite still as he braided her hair, and when he pressed a hand to her shoulder she walked forward tamely, toward his father's camp.

 

 

 **V.**  
  
This island was called Tanatus.  It sounded like Demetrius' word for death.  Flavia might as well be in the Land of the Dead, she thought, she was so far from her former self.  She could see the tower, where Aquila had lit the last bonfire, and the smudge of the town below.  But even if she were to escape, to steal a boat or just walk out until the current took her, she had nowhere to go.  The legions were gone, and she was a girl without a family.  
  
The camp was just a few rough huts, but men were digging ditches and pacing out squares as if they expected an army.  The big man guided her to one of the huts, and called out, "Hilde!"  This produced a tall girl-child with shining yellow braids, a small round woman with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and a puppy.  The man spoke rapidly.  His sister looked confused, then shrugged and held up her hands; he spun her about in a circle, laughing, trying not to trip on the puppy.  
  
"He says you are her slave now," said the older woman.  She spoke like Gwyna.  Flavia choked, scrunched her eyes shut for a moment, and stood up straight.  The girl giggled.  
  
"Wulfhild says you look half-drowned," the woman told her.  "You could do worse for a mistress than young Hilde, you know, though I see you won't bend easy.  I shall find you a cloak and some water, and then we must be working, for these men won't feed themselves."  
  
At night the fires smoked and popped.  The wood was too fresh.  Flavia found herself following the girl Hilde with a jug full of wine.  The Saxons did not water their wine at all.  Instead Hilde went from man to man with a cup, and they laughed or grunted, and shouted a toast, and then gave the cup back to her.  Hilde was pretending to be a queen, Flavia thought.  It was clear from the way the child stood, so solemnly.  
  
Their circuit started and ended at a fire where a huge man was holding court.  He was wearing her father's ring; Flavia saw the light glint in it, green and orange.  She pretended to be a rock, and an arrow, and a sword.  
  
Another man grabbed at her waist, and Flavia started, and sloshed the wine.  She thought of kicking him, or of falling into the fire, but the flames were not high enough.  The man gripped harder.  
  
Flavia heard a growl.  It was the man Wihtgar, Hilde's brother.  He was watching her, eyes narrowed, as if-- as if she were something puzzling, like a line of Greek verse-- and growling all the while.  The men all shouted in laughter.  Hilde tossed her head, and began walking back toward the hut, for Flavia to follow.  
  
Green and orange flared inside Flavia's eyelids, all the night long.  But she felt a sort of spark behind her breastbone, too, a strange bit of warmth, that she could not at all account for.

  
 **VI.**  
  
The next year, Wihtgar brought a length of silk for his sister, and a brooch for her handmaiden.  She looked at him sidelong when he held it out.  It was bronze, and shone softly.  
  
"Who had this first?" she asked.  
  
"I bought it with my own coin!" he said, stung.  "It holds your cloak on, like so."  
  
The rough wool was draped about her, haphazardly.  He bent and pinned it together, just below her throat.  She watched him steadily.  He tugged a fold of the wool over her head; she could never keep her hair covered, somehow.  She tipped her head back to look him in the eye, and the cloak slipped down again.  
  
He kissed her on the brow and on the mouth.  She was still for a moment and then fierce, tugging his head down, biting his lip.  He slipped his hand down past her waist and she huffed out a short hard breath.  
  
"The fine for lying with another man's slave," she told him, "is six shillings."  
  
"Tell me where to spend my coin, and I will spend it."  
  
She screwed her eyes shut tight and kissed him again, snarling.

  
  
 **VII.**  
  
Flavia was carrying a child.  She might have told herself it was not happening for a few weeks yet, but the moon had waxed and waned without her bleeding, and she found herself waking at odd moments in the night.  The child was _hers_.  Not for always, maybe-- Flavia was too old to set herself against the gods-- but as long as she could hold him safe, she would.  
  
A dog barked.  The White Horse men were coming home again.  The camp was bigger now, with huts laid out in circles, and beginning to look like a town.  Flavia thought she would sit by her spinning, rather than fighting through the noise.  Wihtgar would find her, or not, as it pleased him.  
  
A dog barked again and a cry rose, the keening cry of a young woman.  Flavia let her spindle fall to the dirt.  That was Hilde's voice, wailing for death.  Flavia walked slowly toward the noise.  There was a great clump of men, still carrying their shields.  There was Hilde, with her hair loose, bemoaning a great warrior.  And there was Wihtgar, with a red line scratched along each cheekbone, looking solemn.  It was their father who was dead, their father Wiermund of the White Horse.  
  
Flavia breathed out, carefully.  "Aquila," she told her brother's shade, "somebody has avenged you."  Then she started edging through the crowd, to retrieve Hilde.  There would be a great feast for Wiermund's remembrance, and that meant work before wailing.  
  
Wihtgar came to find her as she was chopping leeks.  "Are you chieftain, now?" she asked.  
  
"Yes," he said, bemused.  "I think I am.  But we all serve Hengest, these days."  
  
"Will you take a wife?"  Better to know the worst up front.  The child was hers, anyway.  
  
"Yes."  
  
Flavia bent over the leeks.  This layer was full of dirt, and so was this one.  She needed another bucket of water.  
  
"Listen," Wihtgar said, "Listen.  I brought you something."  He opened his hand, and there was a ring.  Her father's ring, with the green fire at its heart.  
  
"I don't understand."  
  
"I give you a gift, this morning, to take you as my wife."  
  
The ring fit over her thumb.  She turned the stone inward, and cupped her hand around it.  "And I am taking you," she said, "as my husband."    
  
Later they would speak the vows again, before a witness.  Later she would tell him of their son.  "You are mine, now, you know," she told him.  
  
"I bow to my fate," he said, solemnly; and then he laughed, and spun her around like a child, spilling the leeks.  The knife fell into the grass, among the first white clover flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> For Jin, who asked about trust.
> 
> Flavia's captors are Saxons, and the few words she knows are Old Saxon, though the names are filtered through later Anglo-Saxon writing. The boat is like the boat sacrificed in Nydam bog, in Denmark. The brooch is of the type that archaeologists call "cruciform", though "crossbow-shaped" might be more accurate.
> 
> Thanks to Isis for books, encouragement, and thoughtful reading, and to Carmarthen for organization and another excuse to read the Vindolanda letters.
> 
> This story is derived from a work of Rosemary Sutcliff, which was derived in turn from eighth- and ninth-century histories, which might have derived from a true story. You are welcome to make another history.


End file.
